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Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.
Chris Jennings: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Duck Summit podcast. I'm your host, Chris Jennings. Joining me in studio today is my co-host, Dr. Mike Brasher. Mike, how are you? I'm doing well. Good Wednesday afternoon to you, Chris. Thank you very much. Also joining us via remote here is Kevin Cry, the Texas waterfowl program leader. Kevin, how are you? Welcome back to the DU podcast.
Kevin Kraai: I'm doing really good, really good. And I'm excited to be rejoining you guys for another conversation that we've been kind of No one was going to happen and looking forward to. So, uh, I'm excited for today.
Mike Brasher: Didn't have anything on your plate over the past two or three months. Absolutely nothing in your time, two or three years, right? That's more like it.
Kevin Kraai: This is not a, this is not a new thing. It's, it's been a long, long process to say the least.
Chris Jennings: Yeah, I think last time you were on the DU Podcast, you and I were talking and then we got off the air and you had kind of mentioned, you know, hey, I got something we might want to talk about, not right now, but here in the future. And so now it's finally come to fruition and that specific topic is the future of light goose harvest management in Texas. And Mike, I don't know if you wanted to kick this off or I'll just go ahead and punt one over to Kevin here. you know, let's start from the very beginning, and why were you even looking at the potential changing the harvest management in Texas, and how did this whole conversation start, like you said, probably years ago?
Kevin Kraai: Right, right, yeah. So yeah, I mean, there's… A huge announcement to be made here, and that's last month, Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, at the advisement of our staff advisory board, officially passed a recommendation to eliminate the conservation order as a management tool in the state of Texas. For us, in my career, it's probably one of the biggest victories, in my opinion. It's a huge victory for our resource, it's a huge victory for the the species, snow geese themselves, bringing respect back to snow goose hunting is what we're basically coining it. And the reality is after many, many years of watching changes, you know, there's just changes going on landscape, changes in bird distribution, changes in harvest distribution, changes in hunter participation. We basically said, you know, that the true definition of insanity is, you know, doing nothing and expecting the same result. And the reality is, our job is to take care of the resource first, and we were seeing unsustainable trends in the state of Texas, you know, with this very, very important resource to us, and that's snow goose, light goose hunting. You know, we've said it time and time again, we really were kind of the inventors of snow goose hunting, you know, Texas rags, it was all kind of situated and centered around Texas for, you know, many decades, and, you know, the snow goose hunting capital of the world, Eagle Lake and Garwood in that country. And so when we started to see research and trends and documents, documentation showing a growing abundance of these species, and researchers and managers said, let's lean on the shoulders of our hunters. What's already out there, let's ask them to help us out. with this issue that we think is very important for the future of the species, you know, we were really the ones that were ready to step up first. You know, we had all the techniques, we had all the skills, we had all the birds at the time, you know, in the mid to late 90s. And yeah, we went out and, you know, kind of did our job. You know, if you look at some of these trends associated with harvesting, this conservation order and hunter participation, you know, initially it was through the roof and we begin to see pretty rapid declines from that point on. We begin to see declines in our abundances in the state, begin to see declines in participation. All that correlated very similarly to when we started this conservation order. And to be very, very, very clear here, and we'll probably talk about this a lot today, a conservation order is a management tool. It was never, ever intended to be additional hunting opportunity. for financial gain, for any of that stuff. It was a management tool. It's not a hunting season. It is literally outside the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. And so looking at all the information that we have, the data, trends and abundances in Texas, trends and abundances continentally, which, you know, we'll get into here in a minute, which few people are aware of, drastic changes. Our staff, our commission, very successfully and proudly made a huge statement to be an important domino to fall and leader going down this path in the future of light goose harvest management. And we're going back to the way it was before. Very simply, that's all it is. We're going right back to the way it was before the conservation order. We're pretending it never existed. Providing a full 107 day season, which is allowed by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. We're going to a five bird bag limit. Very, very significant change. We were at 10. A couple years prior to that, we were at 20. Right now, all the other Central Flyaway States are allowed 50. And so we feel it's important for us to kind of step up and do what's best for Texas at this point and truly be the only place in North America where there is true sanctuary and a rest period for these birds that are truly pressured throughout most of their annual life cycle.
Mike Brasher: Kevin, there's a lot to unpack here throughout this conversation. A ton.
Chris Jennings: I think you covered it all. Let's wrap it up.
Mike Brasher: No, I'm just kidding. So, one of the things that I want to add on to there, right at the very end, you talked about Texas being the only state that's providing that sort of sanctuary during that spring period, but that's actually, that's within the portion of North America that is, for which there is allowed a light goose conservation.
Kevin Kraai: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mike Brasher: that with regard to where the light goose conservation order has been sort of permitted, and like Pacific flyway states still do not have access to it, right?
Kevin Kraai: You're correct. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's, you know, this issue really popped up, you know, greater light snow geese are a different conversation. What we're talking about here today, to be very, very specific, we're talking about mid-continent light geese, and that is, you know, eastern Texas, southern Texas, you know, Mississippi flyway, eastern half of the central flyway. The western half of the central flyway is a separate subspecies that we refer to as the western central flyway population of light geese. Very, very visually noticeable when you cross that line. There's just very, very few blue geese, blue-faced snow geese, a growing abundance of Ross geese. Those birds were not declared overabundant in 1998. Those birds were, you know, just kind of riding on the coattails of mid-continent birds. And because of overlapping migration and similar looks, You know they were included. And so that's a question I get a lot in the state, you know, big giant state we've talked about this a dozen times about all the different diversities of this state and habitats and, and, you know, we have an east and west here, you know, east and west zone in Texas and, you know, A handful, a number of hunters are displeased across the board, obviously, but even in West Texas, you know, the Texas Panhandle and whatnot, it's like, well, our numbers aren't declining. They're remaining steady. Why include us? Well, they were never really intended to be included in the first place. So there's kind of riding the coattails. And so when we made this decision, we very strategically and specifically said this would be a statewide move. And so, yeah, we're talking mid-con at light geese, and that's the birds that You know, we're on the Texas coast, in the famed rice country, in the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, now, you know, very prevalent in, you know, the Mississippi Alluvial Valley that you obviously have all seen. So that's the species, that's the group of birds we're talking about here. That's the group of birds that research was showing potential habitat degradation during stopover locations along west coast huts and bay. That's the group of birds that we really targeted as a management community 25 years ago now to try and reduce adult survival and try and increase harvest rates. And without diving off into the weeds too quickly here, published literature, new knowledge has shown that we haven't been able to do either.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, Kevin, we had an extensive conversation with Rocky Rockwell and Ray Aliasaskus back when we first started this. Snow Goose was one of the first topics that we really delved off into, and that was a moment in time where we were really starting to look deeply at some of the data that we're going to talk a lot about, at least as it relates to the larger scale population growth rates of the mid-continent population. You guys in Texas have been looking at declining midwinter numbers of snow geese for 15, what is it, 20 years or 30 years?
Kevin Kraai: Almost perfectly correlated to the beginning of the conservation. Yeah.
Mike Brasher: Right. So that's been a discussion for you, your hunters, your agency for several decades. But when Rocky and Ray were on with us, and I encourage people to go back and listen to those episodes. You got to go back a long way to find them. But you'll hear some of, even at that time, they were talking about some of the same things that we will reference here. Not quite to the extent that we've learned about them over the past few years, but still relevant. And I think that's going to be a theme that you'll hear a lot of as we go through this, is that we make decisions at a given point in time based on the information we have at hand. And we do our best, and Kevin, you, and all of our other state and federal and university partners do our absolute best to make sure those decisions are based on the most credible, reliable information at that time. think most of us would hope all of us would say we do a damn good job of that. That doesn't mean that what we knew 10 years ago is the same as what we know today. Things change, methods change, we start learning new information. So, that's something that we'll talk about a fair bit. I do want to, I guess, sort of clarify that or add that one of the things that makes this conversation even more challenging for certain for certain audiences is the realization that there are some populations, as you referenced, there are several populations of light geese, or I guess we would say snow geese. I don't know, I guess, do you lump them together because you get Ross?
Kevin Kraai: We do. It's blue phase, white phase, snow geese, and Ross geese. They're lumped in light geese, yeah.
Mike Brasher: And so, when you look out West, the Western population of light geese is actually increasing pretty dramatically, right? So, you've got some folks out West that are… Certainly doing better. I don't know about dramatic increases, but they're doing better. Okay. And so, they at least had been pretty dramatic over some recent period of time. I'm not exactly sure what the latest is, but they were to a point of concern where they were wanting and trying to advocate for the availability of the light goose conservation order to be to be implemented there. I don't know if any of those conversations remain active, but that sort of adds to the complexity and the importance of partitioning out what it is that you're going to be talking about, and you've already identified, the mid-continent population of light geese.
Kevin Kraai: Yeah, that's a very, very important key conversation. Part of this conversation is that is the specific group of birds we're talking about.
Mike Brasher: Kevin, I would like to start, I guess, here with the data, the observations that you, your staff, your hunters have been making over the years. And it's, I recall being on the Gulf Coast and with the joint venture, we were revising some of our conservation planning models and population objectives. to reflect what was happening with the population of light geese. There was, when we first developed our habitat objectives, the abundance of light geese on the Texas coast and Louisiana coast as well, were well above what we had identified as objectives. So we had these kind of, what was it? We had to account for the number of light geese above objectives in order to calculate habitat needed to to feed the ducks basically. But then as we went a few years forward, we began to collect additional data that showed the decline in light geese on the Texas coast and we revised our population objectives and in turn revised our habitat objectives accordingly to account for that decline. and foraging need for that large group of birds. So, talk about that. Like, lay this out. What have you seen on the coast, throughout the Texas geographies, and what are some of the things contributing to that? We've, you know, the implementation of the light goose conservation order is one of those things that kind of demarcates that point in time, but that's not the only thing that's been changing, right? No, no, not at all.
Kevin Kraai: You know some of the criticism is, you know, we're, you know, it's, it's not just, you know, the hunting and hunting pressure that has caused. winter abundances in the South. I mean, the reality is it's not just Texas. You know, you get to the terminus of the flyway, we're seeing it in other states as well. But, you know, when we used to be the center point of Snow Goose world, to be where we are now, obviously is what drove that conversation. You know, my job as a waterfowl biologist for the state of Texas is to pay attention to those things. And when appropriate, react. And we've been watching this for a long time. And so yeah, you know, essentially we've seen abundances in the mid to late 90s, well, well above a million birds on the Texas coast. You know, we just kind of got used to that. We thought that's how it would stay. And this is when their abundances continentally were not as high as what we saw, you know, a decade or two later. And so the reality is, you know, we're talking kind of like redheads in the Laguna Madre. We're talking a significant proportion of the overall population of mid-continent light geese were in Texas, a very significant proportion. And we begin to see that change. Like I said a minute ago, it was literally, if you overlay that graph on top of our midwinter estimates on our coastal goose survey, to when we started these liberalized means of harvest. It's not just the conservation order. It was a complete revamping of our regular season as well. Um, we basically removed bag limits. I mean, not many people shot 20 birds a day or whatever. Um, you know, and we begin to see this incredible liberalization all at once. And just almost instantly we begin to see, uh, interaction or changes in that, in that abundance in our, in our, in our monitoring almost instantly. Yeah, that has impacts. Pressure has impacts. We're not saying they all got shot. We're saying that being out there chasing these birds, bad limits, unreachable, you know, soon as soon as the regular season's over, which is a very, very liberal regular season. The next day, we have no regulations whatsoever. Zero. You go do whatever you want. All these additional methods are now legal. That has impacts. That has huge impacts on bird behavior. The one thing we've learned about snow geese is, over the years, throughout this entire process, is their incredible resiliency and their incredible intelligence. We've always known they're an old flock, and I mean by old flock, they have a lot of older birds that are, you know, north of 10 to 15 years old that have been playing this game a long time. So we've always known that these birds are adaptive, are intelligent, and are going to respond to that. They're not simply gonna just sit there and continue to be harassed and shot at in the exact same spots every single day and expect them to stay there. And so that plays a huge role in it. We are not blinded by the fact that habitat conditions have drastically changed down there. We understand that Houston is expanding. Katy Prairie, which used to be one of the most important places in North America for snow geese, for lack of better terms, doesn't exist. It's been completely swallowed up by the city of Houston and Katy and all that urban sprawl. Historically, these birds were coastal marsh birds. This is even before there was rice. They were going to that coastal marsh and grubbing and feeding in that real shallow, very important system that has been very, very well documented and clearly changing, turning to open water, saltwater intrusion. I mean, there's just a myriad of issues that's going on with that coastal marsh that has changed. You move a little bit further inland, they found sanctuary, if you will. They found their heaven in rice agriculture for many decades. And that's changed so dramatically. There used to be so much rice down there, and it was farmed so much differently back in the day. It's now like anything in life, you know, you want to be good at what you do and you don't want to waste. And so, you know, these farmers have gotten better at what they do, you know, laser leveling fields so that they're all the exact same elevation, you know, they're more efficient at getting all the rice out. And so that's changing, you know, how, you know, what's available to them post-harvest, you know, and those type of things. And then probably most importantly is water abundance. You know, there's no question that we're dealing with a a growing population of humans in the state of Texas and the source for the primary source for all that water and that rice landscape is right on top of one of the largest growing populations of humans in the United States and that's that Austin area. And so the competition for water is unlike we've ever seen. And so, you know, water availability has drastically changed the way, you know, farmers are able to behave down there. And so we're seeing obvious declines in rice agriculture production. We're seeing changes in landscape use, we're seeing land change over from rice to other practices, and so that's all occurring. But I will say, we are literally sitting here as we speak, and we'll talk about more in a minute, but you know we're not just changing regulations, we're putting our our money where our mouth is and are in a very active, growing, flourishing program to provide sanctuary and roof ponds for ducks and geese in that landscape for a number of different reasons. And some of our earlier monitoring is truly showing some really interesting issues of everybody says, well, it's just habitat and they're eating everything up and then they're leaving. We're literally documenting places that never see a snow goose, that are flooded up to the heads on rice. And so there's literal habitat that's going unused on that landscape now that we didn't really have access to that knowledge until recently. And so it is a complicated equation and we are doing everything we can with our partners and the joint venture like you mentioned. NGOs like Ducks Unlimited, and you name a myriad of individuals that are interested, we're doing our best habitat wise. But in this particular instance, one of the key drivers in bird distributions and behavior is pressure associated with the pursuit of hunting and harvest. And that was one of the things we have control of. And it was the one thing that we in Texas felt like as an early first step. that we should take. It doesn't seem logical to us to sit there and say, okay, because of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, we have these boundaries on you today. And then the next day, stepping back even further, it's like, hey, we're noticing this problem. We're seeing these declines. It's very concerning to us. Our hunters were greatly concerned. Some of the hunters that were most vocal, if you will, about our decisions were the ones that were saying, hey, this is terrible. You should have seen what it used to look like. And we were very much aware of what it used to look like. And the next day, literally the next day, we were like, yeah, go do whatever you want because we don't care today. You can go use any means necessary to chase these birds until the very, very last day that they're in the state of Texas. And we just didn't see any logic in that anymore. We didn't see any logic in watching our birds decline, decline, decline, and do nothing. with the one tool we have. And it's not like the conservation order is a requirement. It's not like we're saying we're eliminating this thing. We're basically just saying we no longer need that management tool that is available to us. So we're very unique. We're very unique when it comes to that conversation. on a continental scale so when you say why Texas only that's the number one question we get it's like well right now that's all we have control of and we're doing what's best for what is better for our resources and what we have available at our fingertips.
Chris Jennings: Yeah, I've got a couple questions here and then we can put them together. But one, you mentioned like putting the, laying the chart, looking at the graph basically, the abundance of mid-continent geese in Texas and looking at that and seeing that correlate directly with the light goose conservation order as that beginning of the decline. Now, can you put that same abundance chart down with available rice habitat, and how does that… Does it look the same? I mean, that's me kind of playing the devil's advocate here and just kind of pointed out, like, your rice production continued to decline as well, so available habitat for these birds, you know, is… Like you said, there's many, many factors in this, but that just kind of seems like… I know we've talked about that a lot, you know, the lack of water, lack of available habitat. especially on the Texas prairie. That plays into this, does it not? And then the second part of that question, and I think this is, for me, one of the most important ones, what's the objective? Like, is your guys' goal to get all these geese back in Texas? Like, do you think now that if we cancel this, like, you know, take some pressure off and those birds will come back?
Mike Brasher: So, Chris Jennings is over here doing the same thing that I usually do. That's like ask two or three questions in one.
Kevin Kraai: I'm proud of you, man. I'm proud of you.
Mike Brasher: And so, hey, I'll also interject here. I have that graph that you're asking about. Kevin might have it in front of him, too. But go ahead, Kevin.
Kevin Kraai: I don't have it in front of me.
Chris Jennings: You guys didn't share all the information with me here.
Kevin Kraai: I see.
Chris Jennings: What was the first question? Basically, the correlation between habitat, the rice habitat.
Kevin Kraai: Oh, yeah. So, yeah, we've done that. Me and my staff have done that. We've laid all those out and kind of done a regression on it. And certainly loss of habitat, loss of riot acres is part of the explanation. But the largest, you know, when you look at that modeling, if you will, the biggest explanation, one that is strongest in that modeling is the beginning of the conservation order. without question. Rice is interesting. I mean, we definitely have gone big changes, you know, over the decades, but then you kind of get these flat pulses where there's numbers of years where it's kind of same, you know, kind of staying real steady. And largely the last decade or two, or last decade, it's been pretty steady with the exception of a couple of years, like we're in right now, where there's been water restrictions. And so, yeah, when we don't have water restrictions from those reservoirs in the Austin area, you know, Rice Acres has been really steady the last few years, or last decade for that matter, but we see big changes when we have water restrictions like we do now. And so, yeah, it plays a role, but it's not a strong factor when you truly put a regression on that. What is the strongest driving factor there? And so that's, you know, part of the reason why we felt like that was our first step.
Mike Brasher: Let me add some, I guess, color to this particular conversation here, because I am looking at the graph here. Eventually, if we ever go video, then we'll be able to put this up and show people this little graph. We can share screens. That's right. That's right. So, if you go back, because I dealt with, Kevin, you'll know this, I dealt with this planted rice acreage data on a basically daily basis for the 13 years I was with the joint venture down there. And so, when you go to… Let's say 1982, coastal Texas. There was somewhere in the neighborhood of 550, 580,000 acres during any given year planted rice. There was a decision made in the early 80s, and I forget, some farm bill related or some farm policy, it wasn't farm bill, but some farm policy related decision that caused a dramatic, almost instant decrease in the amount of planted rice acreage. I used to know exactly what that was. but it caused a dramatic decrease in the planted rice acreage there on the Gulf Coast, dropped down to, if I can get this, it's like 320, so almost 280, no, 200,000 acre decline in just a few years. And so then it continued a steady downward decline until, let's say, the past 10 years, as Kevin talked about, and it's kind of flattened out at about probably 150,000 to 190,000 acres during any given year on the Texas coast. So, it's been a huge, huge drop. So, concurrent with that, and Kevin, this is the way I would always explain kind of what's driving some of those distributional shifts of light geese, is that it's not just about what's happening in Texas either, because you've got several things happening. You've got decline in rice acreage, dramatic… dramatic long-term decline in rice acreage in Texas. You've got the introduction of the Light Goose Conservation Order to an area that was the absolute best at hunting snow geese at the time. They knew how to do it. If you're going to find any group of hunters, it's going to be most successful at putting maximum pressure on a group of birds. It was going to be on the Texas coast. Simultaneous with that, you had states like Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri showing dramatic increases in the amount of planted rice acreage. Arkansas has over a million, on average, over a million acres of planted rice now. So, the birds had alternatives. They had a shrinking habitat base on the Texas coast, they had increasing pressure on the Texas coast that probably was unmatched anywhere else in the country at that time, and they had other places where they could go. So, I think those three things, big things in combination, and you add the water as a habitat component, those are the three factors that I've always talked about as being uh, in combination responsible for what we're seeing there.
Kevin Kraai: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's, again, it's just one of those things where, you know, we're getting, you know, pushback is like, well, if we get these comments, well, if it wasn't the actual shooting of the birds and why change anything, I was like, well, the numbers are the numbers. I mean, you know, we just can't sit on our hands and watch. you know, them go away to the point like we've seen with white fronts on the coast or mallards on the coast or cackling geese on the coast. Those things have all occurred and, you know, it's our job to take care of that resource first and so pretending like there's this huge continental problem with overabundance of light geese destroying their destroying their habitat and going to have this giant die off, which has now been scientifically disproven. And continuing down that path was just illogical to us for what's best for the state of Texas.
Mike Brasher: You control the controllables. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so then back to your second question.
Chris Jennings: Yeah, the objective. I mean, you're trying to get them back. And yeah, I mean, is that the goal too? Are you guys just now, I say this kind of in, I guess, jest, but is Texas just overall the ones leading the protecting of this species from a continental perspective? Or is the goal to get these birds to return to Texas? Right.
Kevin Kraai: Well, the goal is to take care of what we have left. To be 100% honest with you, it's not Um, you know, we're not, we don't have our blinders on thing. We're going to have 150 or excuse me, 1.5 million snow geese in the state of Texas again, just because we made this one little move. The goal is to take care of what we have left and that was kind of one of the main conversations we had. One of our main bullet points is, this is what we have left and let's start paying attention to that and do what's best for what we have left. Yeah, man, it'd be potentially, to say it can't have an impact would be wrong. Could we see growth with what habitat we have left? Yes, especially if you correlate it back to the fact that we are really, really aggressively beginning to deliver habitat and water on the landscape from November 1st to March 31st in key areas, very strategic key areas along this important landscape, well-funded, very well-funded, that's going to grow. When you correlate those two things, yes, we totally expect to see changes in abundance, but we're realistic. were very realistic and at the same time it wasn't like we just pulled the rug out from under everybody's feet. There's an interesting story that part of this story is that a year ago over a year ago our staff unanimously voted and with 100% support of our advisory committee to eliminate the concert or propose to eliminate the conservation order to our commission and in the last day of duck season um to have a true a much longer rest period prior to northward migration and um for a number of different reasons I felt obligated to kind of hit pause on that before we took that package to our commission. I wanted to make sure our staff knew there was a couple other options. I wanted to make sure our advisory board knew that and I wanted to, you know, go to the public with scoping meetings and let them know what we were doing and be a little bit more transparent. So, we hit pause right in the middle of the process. A year later, we brought it back up, you know, this past December. After listening to the public, literally after our scoping meetings, we had two in-person scoping meetings where we had the public come in. I was able to present, you know, kind of the packet of information that we have now at our fingertips and the history. And I took the results of that meeting and those comments from the public to our staff, our in-house Migratory Bird Technical Committee. It's 40-something biologists from across the state and leaders in our agency. And I was like, reminded them, this is what you recommended last year. This is what the public that showed up at those meetings said. the majority of the comments said they support not using the conservation order, the majority of the respondents said they support a full 107 days season, and the majority of the respondents said they support a reduction in bag limit. I showed that to our staff. I then gave them my recommendation from the program, you know, which I guess is important since that's what I think about day in and day out, and they agreed with me. They agreed with me across the board that we should have a full 107 day season, a five bird bag limit. and no longer use the conservation order. And that is the proposal that we brought to our commission, that ultimately our commission approved a few weeks ago. And so there was some give and take. It wasn't like we pulled the carpet out completely from underneath them. We do feel that there should be ample opportunity for hunting, truly hunting snow geese on the Texas coast. And that's ultimately where we landed.
Chris Jennings: Now, I'm going to ask this question, playing devil's advocate once again, and because… You're good at that. I know, I know. Do your thing, man. Do my thing. But it's also, you know, something that I saw on… Man of the people. It was either one of the forums or, you know, something online, a social post or something, that basically said, well, if that would work to get snow geese back into Texas, then why would Illinois not try something like this with Canada geese for Southern Illinois? You know, that was the goose hunting capital of the world. for so many years, and those birds are just non-existent in that area now, pretty much. You know, what would you say to someone online, probably you probably wouldn't even respond, but someone asking you at one of these meetings, bring that up and say that, like, you know, how do you approach that? I mean, different landscapes, different habitats, different, you know, species, everything all together. So, how do you answer that question?
Kevin Kraai: Well, a very, very PC answer is, again, going back to what Mike said, Mike and I have had long careers now and have seen lots of changes and lots of things unfold before our eyes that we wouldn't have thought would have unfolded in our early stages of our career. But we're seeing with this growing desire to throw transmitters on birds of all kinds and the new technology that we have now at our fingertips, we never thought we'd be able to do the things we're getting to do now. and learn the things we're getting to learn and watch what we're getting to watch and and to see year after year after year of of good habitat conditions and resiliency and ducks and geese to you kind of overcome you know drought and pitfalls and temporary changes and still be you know doing okay but yet one thing we're watching and one thing we're learning is the tolerance of pressure and our improvements in technology and our improvements in the ability to be better hunters, better camo, better decoys, affluent young people that are willing to travel and go anywhere to do anything. There's no question in my mind when I leave this career that I have strong opinions that pressure can really, really, really change bird behavior. and really, really change where they want to be. You know, we're seeing this stuff in our telemetry work where, you know, birds either, they'll just leave an entire landscape or they'll go hide during daylight hours. You know, they learn after us and they understand those things. And, you know, one of the things I keep saying about snow geese is, you know, I kind of mentioned them earlier is, you know, they historically lived in two inches of water on the Texas coast, whether it be a rice field or a marsh, you know, grubbing and foraging. And now almost 100% correlative to some of our management actions in regards to year-round pressure, especially on snow geese. It is year-round pressure. When they're in North America, most places, it is legal to shoot at them or pursue them. And some near year-round pressure and unprecedented regulation change, those birds are 100% happy sitting in 70 feet of water in giant concentrations on a cold-fired power plant lake in the middle of Kansas or Illinois now by the hundreds of thousands. They're completely happy doing that as long as they can fly, you know, 40, 50 miles out to some cornfield that has some waste grain still on the ground. So that's a direct change in behavior and distribution directly associated with our presence on the landscape and our actions. So I'm not going to sit there and speak for an Illinois waterfowl biologist in any way, shape, or form, nor would I want them doing that for me either. But the reality is We do have impact. Our presence on that landscape has impact, and we're better at what we do now than ever before. It doesn't mean that very sustainable waterfowl hunting pursuit isn't available. It is completely viable. If you have to make decisions that's important to your localized area, then you have to make decisions that's important to your localized area.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, this is one of the more rewarding, fascinating, I guess, intellectually reflecting type conversations I've ever had. on the podcast because it involves so many complex… It involves the complex interplay of so many different factors. And so, Chris, as Kevin's been talking, I've been sitting here thinking about your question and like, can I imagine a scenario where you would see a dramatic increase in the number of snow geese that are going back to Texas? And I can come up with a… And why would we see it for snow geese and not Canada geese in Illinois? And I can make up a story. I can come up with a scenario. I don't know if it would happen. But one of the biggest differences between snow geese and Canada geese, at least as we've observed over the past 30 or 40 years, is the potential When conditions are right, when things line up for snow geese to increase dramatically in population size, if they get several successive years of good conditions that allow them to, I mean, because the landscape that at least the food availability across the mid-continent that allowed them, that fueled that exponential growth that we saw when we got up to like 20 million or 24 million, that really hasn't changed. We've seen some decline on the Texas coast in rice, but rice in the MAV, corn in the mid-continent, that's all the same, or there's even more of it now. So that agricultural subsidy that fueled that hyperabundance over those years is still there. If things work out and they get several years of fantastic production, you could see population return to really impressive levels, which kind of I'm flirting with one of the other topics that we need to talk about. But if that happens, and if pressure stays high in some of these other areas, I mean, it's entirely understandable, feasible for me to think how there would be an increase in the number of snow geese going, finding their way back to Texas at some point in time. And if they make their way during that season, during that spring season, they find out, oh, this is way better than getting shot at in Kansas. I'm gonna go back here next year. That might happen. That's the way we think ducks and geese make some of these decisions. It's the story that I kind of laid out of what I think contributed to the rapid exodus, decline of snow geese in Texas and increase in some of these other states. So, it's possible. Will it happen? I don't know, but there are some differences between those species that would make me think it's not far-fetched.
Chris Jennings: And another kind of comment that I've seen and something that we talk about a lot here in our office, because we look at a lot of different numbers and the harvest numbers that come out every year and show year over year declines in harvest in multiple species and states. And I mean, that's obvious to you guys. You guys probably talked about it a lot. But I mean, we always talk about the fact that maybe we're not as good at killing these things as we thought we were. And so, like, someone would say, well, you know, the science is actually saying we're not as good. We're not killing enough of them to make a difference anyway. But what you're talking about, Kevin, is not necessarily the numbers of birds harvested. You're talking about just dudes out there in fields with spreads, bumping these birds around, shooting at a couple flies. You know, that's, I think, maybe I'm just trying to clarify something that for our listeners that are maybe thinking, we're not, you're not saying that you guys killed them all. You're just saying that the pressure on the landscape scared them off.
Kevin Kraai: Yeah, it has a huge, huge impact of, you know, just presence absence of us, of the pursuit. You know, I had some really interesting experiences in my career and opportunities to, to go on properties and it's not unique to Texas. It's, it's, I'm sure there's even better properties. But this old age adage of if you build it, they will come is very, very true. I've had the opportunity to step foot on properties. It's like stepping through a time warp from one side of the fence to the other. And what those individuals are doing on that other side of the fence, they have the luxury of being able to very, very successfully meticulously manage habitat on And it's a real luxury. I mean obviously water supply is not cheap, you know, all those things that go into waterfowl management are intense and it is a very expensive process. And so it is a luxury to be able to have that, to have that land, to have the ability to manage it, to intensely manage it. But the key on every single one of those properties, every single one, and I'm sure it plays all the way up to the MAV, all the way up through both Mississippi and Central Flyway. The key to that is managing pressure, to be able to rotate where you hunt, the days you hunt. It is like night and day when you cross these fences and then you look across the other side of the fence. where the vast majority of the humans have access or at least get to see. That has become so abundantly real for me personally to see and to now believe that, yeah, if you build it and you properly manage it and you properly manage disturbance, you can impact that landscape. You can greatly impact that landscape, especially if you start looking at the landscape strategically. And I've said it, I coined it, I have said it in many other places, I don't know if I've said it on this podcast, but I feel very strongly that I live in the state of Texas where we have high senses for big game that is a huge part of our conversations on a daily basis for all my colleagues and friends in Texas Parks and Wildlife. As we drive across the state and we see, but I feel very strongly that high fences for ducks and geese do exist as well. If you know how to do the right habitat management and control disturbance, if you build it, they will come. And that is exactly what we're hoping to do on the Texas coast with not just no geese. A lot of this conversation started with some interesting research that we did in regards to pintail body condition and seeing some of the telemetry work we've been doing. And so it's a multifaceted program that we're delivering. But yes, we do feel strongly that if you can correlate all those things together, you can impact the landscape.
Mike Brasher: So Kevin, one of the questions I have for you is that you've been making a lot of, been making a lot of friends. I can't even ask this question without laughing. You've been making a lot of friends here over the past year or two years, right?
Kevin Kraai: Yeah, there's, there's a, I hate Kevin Cry, Facebook pages all over the place.
Mike Brasher: Yeah. Are you serious?
Kevin Kraai: Yeah. I did not specifically name that, but that's the majority of the comments.
Mike Brasher: You referenced this a little bit earlier with the feedback you sought from your constituents there, but I am kind of curious, like if you had to put percentages on it, what percentage of your hunter base do you think, and you can partition this hunter base however you want to because there are going to be people that specialize in that spring snow goose hunting and then they're going to be your ordinary waterfowl hunters that hunt mostly during the regular season. They're going to go hunt a few snow geese. But what has been, however you care to partition it, the response, reaction of your constituents or the majority of them supportive of this? How much vitriol have you received?
Kevin Kraai: Right. Yeah. So like I mentioned the in-person scoping meetings we had not a lot of people showed up very interestingly between those two meetings I think there was a little less than 50 individuals that came in and were you know given a card with five options of you know for them to give us their preference and that was that isn't that isn't poet comment that was that was very specifically a scoping meeting to assist staff and their you know follow-up recommendations that they that we would have made that we did make to the commission And so from there, after we made those recommendations to the commission, officially put them in the state register, we did go into public comment. We did have a month and a half period or a month period where all the public, anybody can go online and make comments. You don't even have to live in the state of Texas to do it. You can come and comment. And yeah, I mean, the reality was that overall there were the public that did take the time to go in there and look at our recommendations and make a comment were largely against. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me here, but it was like 70% of the public comments did not agree with our decision. That's just the reality sometimes of the business we have to do. I found it very intriguing amount of people that stayed quiet and reached out to me very supportive, very supportive of what we were doing. And they very publicly said, we know we're not there, but you need to know there's a bunch of people out here that are supportive of what y'all are doing, that do understand the science, that do understand your options. And so that helped. That helped that year and a half process of truly getting beaten up. I mean, really getting beaten up over the long haul. But that's sometimes a tough decision. advisory board and our commission have to deal with is, you know, we got to look at the big picture. And I was very proud of our commission to look at what was best for the Texas resource. And so, yeah, it wasn't popular, but even then, it's still a very, I mean, we have tens of thousands of goose hunters in the state of Texas. We still have the second most goose hunters anywhere in the United States.
Chris Jennings: I was going to ask, how many light goose conservation order permits did you guys issue?
Kevin Kraai: Oh, well, yeah, that's another whole part of the conversation. We went from a high of 25,000 light goose conservation participants in 1998 to just barely over 1,000 in the last five, six, seven years. So it's really, really completely waned off. And so harvest obviously highly correlative to that. And so that's another one of the pushbacks. It's like if there's nobody out there, so why take it away from us? Again, just have to circle back that this is not a hunting season. It's not hunting opportunity, it is a management tool that Texas is no longer choosing to take. And it was never designed to be that. And so it isn't about, there's just a handful of us doing it, let us keep doing it. Well, when you look what's going on in the state of Texas and then step back with a different scope, a different set of optics, and you see an 86% decline in the mid-continent population in a little more than a decade, Very, very, very few people realize that. You correlate that. So we're seeing an unprecedented decline in mid-continent light geese, continentally. We're seeing published literature that says conservation order did not achieve the goals that it hoped to do. We see published literature that says that the Arctic was much bigger than we ever thought, and we overestimated their impact they might have. And then you see published literature that the Arctic repaired itself faster than we ever thought we would. You take all that information and it just absolutely was nonsensical for us to continue to do that. To continue to pressure these birds and mistreat them and somehow self-justify people doing these things because they think they're doing what's best for the resource. They think they're doing it to save the tundra. And all these researchers, all these scientists, all these agencies are now pushing back on rhetoric like that. They're not doing it to save the tundra. And they wish that rhetoric never, ever came up, especially us. I mean, we're the last group of people potentially in North America that really, really wants no geese. And we want to see them abundant. And I don't think anybody thinks that some, uh, you know, 1 million total snow geese on planet and North America is a, is a proper goal at all. And some of the early management plans said that. And so, you know, that was, that was information we had 20, 30 years ago.
Mike Brasher: Kevin, you've, you've introduced quite a few additional. additional aspects of this conversation. And that's where we need to go. Those are other things that we wanted to talk about. But what you and your commission have done is certainly an example of swimming upstream against the decisions that a lot of other states are continuing to make. And, you know, we probably will delve into the data that you've used to inform that decision. And I don't fault anybody for saying, here's the data, here's our thinking, these are the objectives, this is therefore the decision that we're making. And to get on any kind of platform and explain it and defend it, I mean, that's what it's all about, making science and database decisions. They're not always easy. You're swimming upstream on this one, but kudos to you and your staff for doing the homework and going forward with these recommendations to the commission. And you obviously were able to convince your commission that this was an appropriate decision. There are a lot of other parts of the conversation that we haven't got to yet, but you've already introduced a few of those and we're going to get to those on the next episode, so I think we're going to wrap it up right here. That's okay with you, Chris? Sounds good. A very special thanks to our guest on today's episode, Kevin Cry, waterfowl program leader for Texas Parks and Wildlife. We appreciate him coming on and sharing information about this really important decision that his state and the commission has made and bringing it here to our listeners to understand what's going on there. We thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for the awesome job he does on these episodes, and I thank my co-host over here, Chris Jennings, for hanging with us on this, and thank you, the listener, for your support of waterfowl and wetlands conservation.